The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast | Hacker News Reader

The Czech Cyber Billionaire Who Founded Avast

forbes.com

62 pointswyndham51 comments

Around 2003/04 was installing Avast/AVG on my friends desktops/PCs was a wonderful freeware. I started working as a system administrator around 2007 when I did the same on a few office machines, I had noticed how they became rogue, By infecting healthy machines with malware and prompting to buy paid version for removal, I am not sure if anyone remembers this thing with Avast ?

Never understood how they survived that. Now they seem to be dominating their country's tech landscape. Market ended up rewarding sociopathic behavior. Pretty terrible.

I have never heard this. Can you provide a link with more details?

This was my personal and honest experience with Avast. They were the first scareware pioneers, If you have used them as I did you would have noticed.

Infecting machines with malware intentionally? They did this and are still allowed to sell product?

This is BS. They never did that.

I did use it then and I never experienced that. I bet it was some unrelated coincidence. They would not do that.

Narrator: They did.

What malware are you referring to? I never had this issue as well. I'm not saying you shouldn't question them, but the only thing I didn't like was they forced advertisements to use the free version. They were still orders of magnitude better than other AV providers, especially what they were selling at Best Buy.

I remember something similar but it wasn't infecting them it was just giving false positives and constantly popping up to upgrade. I can't remember which software it was, it may have been avast.

ZoneAlarm popup ~2004: "IP x.x.x.x is trying to HAXOR you!!1"

They did not infect machines; they just popped up that it found all kinds of things that were not there at all and you should upgrade to fix the issue. That is also a rancid tactic but I think Norton (or Mcafee?) also did it (it has been a long time but I remember either or both of them trying to panic users into buying like that). After upgrading, it would scan and nothing would be found; or at least not what it said before upgrading.

I worked at an ad network company for years (we basically put crappy add-ons on poeple's machines that generate search revenue). All of these AV companies basically extort money from crapware companies. if you pay them, you can get unblocked.

Sounds fascinating. Please tell us more.

At this point Avast is way worse than the malware it claims to protect you from. I've been running Windows for years now with just Microsoft's built-in malware protection and it's fine.

Friendly reminder that free editions of Avast collect and sell[1] user clickstream data to one of Avast's companies, Jumpshot[2][3]. This "panel" includes 100m "online shoppers" and 20m app users, in total registering 5 billion clicks every day.

[1] https://martechtoday.com/jumpshot-makes-public-some-amazon-p...

[2] https://www.jumpshot.com/

[3] https://press.avast.com/avast-software-acquires-jumpshot-to-...

Maybe just my point-of-view. But Czech-Slovak companies have strong influence in antivirus software. With avast.com / avg.com / eset.com

...or does every country in world have their own AV software (local)giants? I'am curious...

Great question! I'm a local and I don't know either..

I think a few AV companies whose products I utilized in the past were from Romania as well (BitDefender?).

I feel like the old soviet countries including russia now are all quite strong in the cybersecurity space. I've heard its because of a combination of their strong math/science education and poverty? I've always found it quite intrigueing

I grew up in Eastern Europe and moved to Western Europe in my early 20s and the difference is that in the East, STEM was very popular for kids in high school and university as it offered access to engineering careers which were the most lucrative considering how poor the economy was in the 90s, helping kids of lower class background move upwards(just like in the US) and it would also open doors later in life to emigrate to the West.

Now in Western Europe, due to socialism and high standard of living, kids aren't that poor and tech salaries are not that much higher than any other desk job so they have no interest to study STEM as it's seen as stressful career path for boring lonely nerds and instead prefer to focus on social sciences, being wantrepreneurs or Instagram influencers.

Not sure, what western european countries pays as much for a tech job as for any other desk job? Also i dont think it has something to do with skills, more like with criminals creating virii and thus developing and understanding of how security works.

Outside the SV bubble law, accounting, banking, medicine, general management etc all pay higher than programming, with less stress, more job security and higher prestige (if that matters to you).

Not really. Devs in the uk earn far more than most of these jobs you mentioned. Perhaps you are working with the wrong company.

There is quite a large difference between tech salaries depending on nationality of the company, their approach to tech and location in the UK.

A Principal Software Engineer in the South East can make six figures easily, the same in the midlands will be much less, and that's only 90 miles apart.

That's a huge wage differential for a country the size of Michigan

Yes ... but remember as well we don't have the "commute many miles" mentality, you tend to work fairly local to where you live.

I might be an outlier, I live 55 miles away from work (1h15m commute each way) so that I can have a higher salary, but much bigger house, better transport links, good schools for the kids etc.

Here in Italy that's very common during your first years, especially if you're not living in a big city like Milan.

It could be also that a lot of white-collar and intellectual cybercriminals are located in those countries.

As another Czech person and former PM of another security product I guess there are two main factors in play:

1. Tech factor: amount of HW and SW what could be exported into Eastern bloc was very limited so people who worked with computers were all very confortable with low level work as getting anything else than bare computer was almost impossible.

2. Business factor: there was close to 0 money available in Easter bloc (= 40 years of comunism destroyed all personal equity as all property from previous generation was confiscated and your earning potential was very limited) so when you started software company you needed sales channel that didn't require much hand holding. Antiviruses are great because you could use listings on download sites and the product is culture agnostic.

In US your best bet in 90s was to create consumer or enterprise SW company. But imagine being in Czech republic: you don't understand the US culture to get into home of people and you don't have access to capital and institutional knowledge to build enterprise SW (no way you was going to afford opening US office on money availale in this region). But hey, no problem writing AV software, then upload it to download.com and then collect payments.

Also those AV companies took so long to take off: Avast was created in late 80s and it took them around 15 years to get any traction. Being in region with more opportunities you probably give up and try something else.

The US has Microsoft.

Who bought Romanian antivirus company.

Microsoft's own inbuilt Windows Defender is Romania's former RAV Antivirus which they bought in 2003.[1]

[1]https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/yongrhee/2019/02/21/wind...

No wonder windows defender is such low quality.

No, it’s a completely different codebase now.

Eastern Europe ran on pirated software thru the nineties. You need good antivirus when running random software copy obtained at the farmers' market from under the blanket.

wish AV vendors would stop MiTM attacks on HTTPs

This. I lost a lot of respect when Firefox complained that something was wrong, and it turned out to be Avast doing a man in the middle attack to 'protect' me on https websites.

You really have to be careful what you check to install or enable when using antivirus software. I think Windows 10 does a pretty good job without any extra software, but there are people that still torrent movies and open EXE files from whatever website they access. Sometimes teenagers or older people. Who knows what they are putting on their computer, and I imagine a lot of it is able to bypass standard AV products.

That's why if you want to install Avast you deselect everything except for the file shield and behaviour shield.

Antivirus software is basically a scam.

ironically it injects crap into your computer so that you cannot uninstall it fully, to prevent people from renewing the free trial.

Though the "hard to uninstall" part is exactly so that malware can't uninstall it easily.

Yeah, on Mac/Windows, I just install the free version of Malwarebytes and do a full scan occasionally...

Back in the day when 3rd party antivirus on windows was a must, these guys were the best price-performance trade-off. Then windows added defender as a standard that was as good, with the added benefit of a shared best interest of making windows run well; at the same time avast et al. moved to scummy practices and FUD. Good riddance.

AV is almost a cargo cult nowadays. Born for windows, now as a de facto must have for corporate IT. Everyone use it. Either no IT bothers to question why is it needed, or management hold beliefs from the 90s that AV is useful

There isn't a big difference between most AV and malware nowadays.

Both hog all your system resources, both send info about you to HQ, both spread often piggybacking on other software, both are hard-to-impossible to remove.

I had forgotten how bad it was back then, and why it was such a relief to leave windows for Linux and mac.

'Baza wirusow zostala zaktualizowana' - in every Polish home 10 years ago.

It wasn't only in polish. We had this in French too. "La base virale VPS a été mise a jour" https://youtu.be/PMro9K5EM0s

maybe https://imgur.com ?

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